Flock may be losing its steam to Firefox

Recently both Flock and Firefox released a new version of their browser product, namely Flock 2.5 and Firefox 3.5. While both browsers are based the Gecko engine, Firefox 3.5 is certainly beating Flock 2.5 in terms of performance.

My default browser used to be Flock, a social web browser that has built-in support for many popular web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us. But, when Firefox 3.5 becomes available, with its latest support for HTML 5, a faster JavaScript engine, the awesome bar and the Personas extension,  I immediately switched.

Before I had switched, I was worried that I will missed the integrated social web browsing experience provided by Flock. But, after I had installed various Firefox plugins for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Blogger, I didn't feel losing much functionality. A faster browsing experience is what I loved about Firefox.

I'm worried about the future of Flock. I wonder if it has become a bloatware.

Mozilla business

Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization. It depends on people donations and contracts to operate it's daily business -- pay for developers, marketings etc. Since 2004, with the success of its Firefox browser, Mozilla has grown into a very successful open source organization, and a very profitable one.

The revenue of Mozilla Foundation increased from $6 million in 2004 to $52 million in 2005. A large portion of this increase is due to a special agreement with Google. The company pays Mozilla more than $100 million to have Firefox's default page to display the Google search page.

In 2005, a new for-profit Mozilla organization is created, which is called Mozilla Corp. A key task of the new organization is to manage tax and other issues related to the Google contract.

Here are couple interesting questions to think about:

1. When the survival of an open source organization (e.g., Mozilla) is depended on special arrangements and agreements with a for-profit company (e.g., Google), can it continue to function independently without being influenced by any business objectives of the for-profit company?


2. Should Mozilla share wealth with thousands of people who have contributed to its open source projects? If so, how?

Source: Firefox faces the costs of success

Wired On The Current Browser War

This Wired News article reviews the status of the current browser war -- IE7, Firefox, Flock, Opera etc. Here is a quick summary:

• IE continues to lose its market share, down to 90% from 97% in two years.


• Firefox's share has steadily increased to 9 percent.


• While Opera tries hard to come out with new features, it's share hasn't really increased (Opera, who?)


• Flock is a new kid on the block. It's a Web 2.0 browser. Built on the Firefox source code, its target customers are commercial companies who want to bundle technologies in a for-profit version of the Firefox browser (podcast).

I don't think there will be an end to the browser war. The war will continue until the end of Internet (if there is a such day). I also believe that there will never be one browser for everyone. It's a competitive market. New browsers will be developed because someone spotted a niche in the market.